2:08 PM
Cloud Services - On Monday, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is expected to announce a new product that allows iPhone owners to stream music from their personal iTunes collections to their phones.
Rumormongers say the music will be stored “in the cloud” — tech jargon for “on Apple’s servers” – although the CultOfMac blog claims inside knowledge that Jobs will instead sell customers a personal storage drive that holds the music and does the streaming from home.
Whatever Apple announces, it follows recent offerings from Google and Amazon that offer cloud-based personal music streaming for Android phone users. Both work similarly: You sign up, then download an application to your Mac or PC that uploads your music collection to Google or Amazon’s servers, and keeps it in sync. To play your music on your phone, you install an Android app that’s a music player that connects to your cloud-stored collection to stream it to your phone.
Google Music is the more impressive of the two: It will automatically upload your personal iTunes collection, including any playlists you’ve created, and keep it in sync. It offers free storage for 20,000 songs, about twenty times Amazon’s free capacity. It stores your recently-played songs on your phone, so you don’t have to stream them again. You can also tell it which tracks from your collection to keep permanently cached on your phone. Next >
Amazon’s and Google’s Cloud Services Compared
Rumormongers say the music will be stored “in the cloud” — tech jargon for “on Apple’s servers” – although the CultOfMac blog claims inside knowledge that Jobs will instead sell customers a personal storage drive that holds the music and does the streaming from home.
Whatever Apple announces, it follows recent offerings from Google and Amazon that offer cloud-based personal music streaming for Android phone users. Both work similarly: You sign up, then download an application to your Mac or PC that uploads your music collection to Google or Amazon’s servers, and keeps it in sync. To play your music on your phone, you install an Android app that’s a music player that connects to your cloud-stored collection to stream it to your phone.
Google Music is the more impressive of the two: It will automatically upload your personal iTunes collection, including any playlists you’ve created, and keep it in sync. It offers free storage for 20,000 songs, about twenty times Amazon’s free capacity. It stores your recently-played songs on your phone, so you don’t have to stream them again. You can also tell it which tracks from your collection to keep permanently cached on your phone. Next >
